In partnership with the Stuart Hall Foundation, we present a screening and roundtable revisiting and reflecting on academic and activist Stuart Hall’s 1979 televisual essay, It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum.

Produced for the BBC’s Open Door series (1973-1983), an experiment in unfiltered access television handing over the airwaves of a Monday evening to marginalized voices, Stuart Hall presents a rigorous deconstruction of the racism - both explicit and more insidious in its subtlety - of the British media from within.

Alongside the original episode, we will screen the moving image work, Don’t Look at the Finger (2017), by artist Hetain Patel which explores, through choreography and sign, how symbols of historical cultural traditions and languages can become blurred and entangled. Don’t Look at the Finger was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella with Manchester Art Gallery and QUAD. Supported by Arts Council England. Initial research supported by Jerwood Choreographic Research Project.

The screening will anchor a wider panel discussion on race, representation and cultural production forty years on since the original BBC broadcast with Patel, Research Fellow & Archive Curator Matthew Harle, Filmography Researcher Melanie Hoyes, Sue Woodford-Hollick (Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation) and chair Dr Clive Nwonka (LSE).